Ryan recently visited Imperial College London for the 75th anniversary of their Silwood Park campus, which was established after World War II for field-based research on topics related to ecology. The event included seminars by distinguished alumni of Silwood park about the campus’s history and the future of research there. Several young Silwood researchers also gave engaging presentations about their recent research. The day before the event, Ryan gave a seminar on our lab’s work on transitions between dispersal assembly and niche assembly in ecological communities.

We have been awarded a new Tier 2 grant by Singapore’s Ministry of Education to develop new models for assessing the viability of species’ populations in variable environments. Population viability analysis is widely used to assess species’ extinction risk, but there is a need to develop more sophisticated methods for incorporating variation in environmental conditions over time. This is especially true given increasingly volatile climate conditions around the world. This grant will allow us to develop these methods and apply them to key focal species in Singapore, including pangolins (Manis javanica) and straw-headed bulbuls (Pycnonotus zeylanicus).

The grant involves co-principal investigators Frank Rheindt and Lim Jun Ying from NUS, and collaborators Chong Kwek Yan from Singapore National Parks, Shawn Lum and Ngo Kang Min from Nanyang Technological University, and Roopali Ragahavan from Mandai Wildlife Group.

Sean Pang has successfully defended his doctoral dissertation titled “Impact of climate and land-use change on tree distributions in southeast Asia”. Sean—pictured below with his examiners—joined our lab last year after his former advisor, Ted Webb, moved overseas. Sean’s research has involved species distribution models of dipterocarp trees in Southeast Asia, and the use of novel methods for assessing their vulnerability to climate and land-use change. Two of his chapters have already been published, in the journals Scientific Reports and Diversity & Distributions. Congratulations, Dr. Pang!

Our review on measuring habitat complexity in ecology has just been published in Ecology Letters. The review is led by Lynette Loke, a post-doctoral fellow at Macquarie University and previous collaborator of our lab. Ecologists have theorised that habitats with higher complexity have higher diversity, and there is some empirical evidence to support this. But generalisations are difficult, partly because complexity is not measured in a standardised way. We review frequently used metrics of habitat complexity and identify qualities that an ideal metric of complexity should possess.

We find that fractal dimension, one of the most commonly used metrics of complexity, is fraught with problems: fractal dimension is hard to measure accurately (see second figure below); most real ecological habitats may not have fractal properties; and fractal dimension is often poorly correlated with diversity. Rugosity, or surface roughness, is another commonly used metric that is easier to measure and better correlated with diversity, but it may not capture important aspects of habitat complexity. We see promise in information-based metrics of complexity, such as entropy, which are more holistic.

Loke, L.H.L. & Chisholm, R.A. (2022) Measuring habitat complexity and spatial heterogeneity in ecology. Ecology Letters (in press)

Our recently graduated Honours student Annabel Lim has been awarded valedictorian of the 2021–2022 undergraduate class in Biological Sciences. Annabel specialised in Environmental Biology and completed a minor in Communications and New Media. She was also awarded the Navjot Sodhi prize and the Malayan Nature Society Silver Medal for Academic Excellence. Her Honours thesis explored conservation planning for dipterocarp forests in the Philippines under future climate-change scenarios. She plans to go on to post-graduate study at the NUS Centre for Nature-based Climate Solutions. Her valedictory speech can be viewed here at 1:48:00. Congratulations, Annabel!

Discoveries of new species continue to be reported regularly in scientific journals and the popular media, but how distinct are these new species from known species? In a new paper led by Deon Lum, a former research assistant in our lab, we explored this question for birds. We drew on multiple existing sources to build a robust avian phylogenetic tree, and explored how much each discovery of a new bird species over the last 250 years has added to our knowledge of phylogenetic diversity.

Our main finding is that newly discovered species are increasingly similar to known species. Around the turn of the 19^th century, novel species discoveries included the Tawny Frogmouth and the Australian Owlet-nightjar, each of which represented a new taxonomic order and contributed roughly 60 Myr to known phylogenetic diversity at the time. In contrast, the most novel discoveries in recent decades have contributed only about 10% as much to our knowledge. One exception proves the rule: the discovery of the Udzungwa Forest Partridge in the 1990s was by far the most novel species in recent decades, but its novel contribution to known phylogenetic diversity was only about 20 Myr—one third that of the earliest decades’ most novel species. We conclude that our knowledge of the avian tree of life is mostly complete.

Deon recently moved to the UK, where he is starting his PhD in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Manchester. The paper was also authored by Frank Rheindt of our department’s Avian Evolution Lab.

Lum, D., F. E. Rheindt, and R. A. Chisholm. 2022. Tracking scientific discovery of avian phylogenetic diversity over 250 years. Proceeding of the Royal Society B 289:20220088

According to the stress-gradient hypothesis, mutualistic interactions between species can become stronger in harsher environments. For example, mosquito larvae in water-filled tree hollows can benefit from the presence of beetle larvae—the beetle larvae shred leaves into smaller pieces that the mosquito larvae can consume—and the benefit is greater when the environment is harsher, i.e., when there is less overall leaf litter available. In a previous study, we failed to find theoretical support for the stress-gradient hypothesis in a mathematical consumer–resource model. But in a new study, we show that the stress-gradient hypothesis can hold if there is a sufficient leakage rate of the downstream resource (the small pieces of leaves in the mosquito larvae example). We additionally show that our previous results are robust to the precise mathematical assumptions about how a species’ consumption rate increases with resource availability.

The new study was led by undergraduate student Sim Hong Jhun, and came out of his Honours project, which was supervised by Lam Weng Ngai (now at Nanyang Technological University) and Chong Kwek Yan (now at the National Parks Board, Singapore). The paper has just been published in the Journal of Theoretical Biology:

Sim, H. J., W. N. Lam, R. A. Chisholm, and K. W. Chong. 2022. Downstream resource leakage a necessary condition for the stress-gradient hypothesis in processing chain commensalisms. Journal of Theoretical Biology 538:111043

Three new students have joined the lab this month. Angelica See is a new PhD student, who recently completed her undergraduate degree in ecology at Nanyang Technological University. Her thesis research will focus on the effects of habitat fragmentation on tropical ecosystems. Kong Fanhua is a visiting PhD student from East China Normal University, where she is supervised by He Fangliang. She is studying species coexistence using empirical and theoretical approaches, and will be with us for two years. Nicholas Foong is an undergraduate student who will be doing his Honours project on global patterns of mangrove diversity. Welcome all!

Ecological communities are universally subject to temporal environmental stochasticity—random variation in environmental conditions over time that cause species’ vital rates to change. This can have both positive and negative effects on species richness. For example, negative effects can arise because stochasticity makes a species more vulnerable to extinction, whereas positive effects can arise because stochasticity reduces the strength of competition between species. Is the net effect on species richness typically negative or positive, and what mechanisms typically dominate? Answering this question is of paramount importance for our understanding of the effects of temporally varying environments on biodiversity. In a study just published in Oikos, Tak and Ryan together with James O’Dwyer from the University of Illinois tackled this topic using a novel mathematical approach that unified past models of temporal environmental stochasticity and generated new insights.

Our novel approach was to focus on one species and approximate the rest of the multispecies community as a single entity, thus converting a many-body problem into a one-body problem and greatly simplifying the mathematics. We developed methods for separating the effects of temporal environmental stochasticity into population-level effects and community-level effects, and found that the strength and direction of these effects varied in complex and surprising ways as a function of temporal correlation in the environmental stochasticity.

Our most tantalising result was that there is a threshold value of temporal correlation above which the net effect of temporal environmental stochasticity on species richness switches from positive to negative. The threshold is approximately twice the reciprocal of the rate at which new species enter the community. This points the way to a practical method for assessing whether temporal environmental stochasticity has a net positive or negative effect on biodiversity in reality, although further theoretical work is needed to test the generality of our result.

Fung, T., J. P. O’Dwyer, and R. A. Chisholm. 2021. Effects of temporal environmental stochasticity on species richness: A mechanistic unification spanning weak to strong temporal correlations. Oikos (in press)

MacArthur & Wilson’s (1967) classic theory of island biogeography predicts that island species richness arises from an equilibrium between immigration and extinction, with islands further from a mainland receiving fewer immigrants and thus having lower species richness. A twist on the basic paradigm occurs for land-bridge islands, i.e., islands that were previously connected to a mainland. Such islands may exhibit more species than expected if insufficient time has passed for the immigration–extinction equilibrium to be reached. For example, in Baja California more lizard species are found on islands that have become isolated more recently in geological time (Wilcox 1978).

In a paper just published in the Journal of Biogeography, we explored whether this effect exists for birds on the islands of Sundaland. The project was led by Keita Sin, a former Honours student in Frank Rheindt’s lab, who created a database of bird diversity on 94 of these islands, from both published inventories and his own field work. We tested whether shelf islands, which have been connected to major landmasses at various points over the last 20,000 years, have higher bird diversity than do oceanic islands. Surprisingly, we found that they do not. Our explanation is that both immigration and extinction rates for birds on islands are higher than for most other taxa, such as lizards and plants, and thus the immigration–extinction equilibrium is reached faster. Immigration rates are higher because birds are effective dispersers; extinction rates may be higher because bird species’ population sizes on islands are typically small. Our results help shed light on the processes that structure species diversity on islands.

Sin, Y. C. K., N. P. Kristensen, C. Y. Gwee, R. A. Chisholm, and F. E. Rheindt. 2021. Bird diversity on shelf islands does not benefit from recent land-bridge connections. Journal of Biogeography (in press)